Eleanor Catton
Eleanor Catton (born 1985) is a New Zealand author. Catton was born in Canada while her father, a New Zealand graduate, was completing a doctorate at the University of Western Ontario. She lived in Yorkshire until the age of 13, before her family settled in Canterbury, New Zealand. She studied English at the University of Canterbury, and completed a Master's in Creative Writing at The Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington. She wrote her first novel, The Rehearsal, as her master's thesis.Eleanor Catton holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she also held an adjunct professorship, and an MA in fiction from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. Currently she teaches creative writing at the Manukau Institute of Technology.
“Remember that anybody who is clever enough to set you free is clever enough to enslave you.”
“It is a mark of the depth of their wounding that they are pretending they suspected it all along. Everything that they have seen and been told about love so far has been an inside perspective, and they are not prepared for the crashing weight of this exclusion. It dawns on them now how much they never saw and how little they were wanted, and with this dawning comes a painful re-imagining of the self as peripheral, uninvited, and utterly minor.”
“I require of all my students… that they are downy and pubescent, pimpled with sullen mistrust, and boiling away with private fury and ardor and uncertainty and gloom. I require that they wait in the corridor for ten minutes at least before each lesson, tenderly nursing their injustices, picking miserably at their own unworthiness as one might finger a scab or caress a scar. If I am to teach your daughter, you darling hopeless and inadequate mother, she must be moody and bewildered and awkward and dissatisfied and wrong. When she realizes that he body is a secret, a dark and yawning secret of which she becomes more and more ashamed, come back to me. You must understand me on this point. I cannot teach children.”
“Gaining control isn't the exciting part. Sleeping with a minor isn't exciting because you get to boss them around. It's exciting because you're risking so much. And taking a risk is exciting because of the possibility that you might lose, not the possibility that you might win.”
“Näyttämön varsinainen jännitys on siinä, että jokin voi mennä vikaan minä hetkenä hyvänsä. Minä hetkenä hyvänsä jokin lavalla voi särkyä tai kaatua; joku voi sotkea vuorosanansa, joku voi pilata valot, joku voi unohtaa korostuksensa tai repliikkinsä. Elokuvan katsominen ei koskaan herätä samaa pelokkuutta, koska lopputulos on aina valmis, ania sama ja aina eheä, mutta näytelmän katsominen herättää sitä usein, koska jokin voi mennä vikaan, ja silloin joutuu katselemaan myötähäpeisin tuntein miten näyttelijät takeltelevat ja kokoavat itsensä. Mutta toisaalta, kun on teatterisalin silkinpehmeässä pimeässä, sitä myös toivoo, että jokin menisi vikaan. Sitä haluaa koko sydämestään. Sitä tuntee lämpöä jokaista näyttelijää kohtaan, jonka hattu putoaa tai nappi irtoaa. -- Jos näkee virheen, joka jää muulta yleisöltä näkemättä, sitä tuntee oikein erityistä etuoikeuden tunnetta, aivan kuin olisi nähnyt vilaukselta sauman kätketystä alusvaatteesta, jostain todella yksityisestä.”